The real Jane Roe

In his two decades as a journalist, Joshua Prager has lived among historical secrets. As a Wall Street Journal reporter, Prager identified the Iranian photojournalist who in 1979 won the only anonymous Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Iranian Revolution; detailed previously unknown struggles of the family of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who safeguarded 20,000 Hungarian Jews from his outpost in Budapest before being disappeared by the Soviet government at the end of World War II; and confirmed the long-held rumors that the New York Giants stole opposing pitchers’ signs as they came from behind to win the 1951 National League pennant. In The Family Roe, Prager turns to his most ambitious reporting yet: a book 11 years in the making that introduces vivid color into the black-and-white world of abortion politics.

The “Roe” of the title is Jane Roe, the pseudonym bestowed on Norma McCorvey when she was 22, pregnant with her third daughter, and seeking to obtain an elective abortion, which was then illegal in 48 states including her home state of Texas. McCorvey’s oldest daughter, Melissa, was being raised by her aunt as if her own, and her second daughter had been adopted by a Dallas family. Although McCorvey was convinced to challenge Texas’s abortion laws, she made clear to her attorneys that, in Prager’s words, “she did not want to further a cause; she wanted an abortion.” By the time Roe v. Wade was decided two and a half years later, McCorvey had carried her pregnancy to term, given her daughter up for adoption, and met the woman who became her partner of four decades, Connie Gonzales.

In Prager’s sprawling narrative, we meet Curtis Boyd, an ob-gyn from Tyler, Texas, who began participating in a clandestine abortion referral network in the late 1960s through his Unitarian church. We meet Mildred Fay Jefferson, the first Black female graduate of Harvard Medical School and a prominent antiabortion activist. We meet McCorvey’s attorneys, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, Weddington the daughter of a Methodist minister and Coffee a Southern Baptist who said shortly after Roe was decided that she “would have little personal sympathy for a woman who used abortion at any stage as contraception or to avoid personal responsibility.”